FEEDING THE NEEDY — BY REDIRECTING PRODUCE.
Ebony Wilkerson’s eyes widen when she sees the cases of fresh portobello mushrooms and bunches of bright green organic cress with their roots still attached.
“You want to take something?” asks Carolyn Lasar, food recovery coordinator at the San Francisco Wholesale Produce Market, whose job is to get donations of produce that merchants can’t use to local organizations that feed the hungry.
“Yes!” says Wilkerson, who prepares 50 to 60 meals and snacks every day for homeless families at Catholic Charities in San Francisco. This is her first time getting donations at the market. Normally she has to sort through whatever she can find at the Food Bank and uses up her budget at Safeway or Costco. The quality here is so much better, with boxes of still-pristine Earthbound Farms organic salad greens and cauliflower that couldn’t be sold because of slight marking.
“I’m super excited,” she says. “I can’t wait to do sweetand-sour cauliflower.”
Located in the Bayview neighborhood, the San Francisco Wholesale Produce Market is one of the Bay Area’s biggest produce hubs inside one of its largest food deserts. At the end of a working day, which goes from midnight to 7 a.m. for the 31 produce businesses that lease space at the market, there’s usually a lot of leftover fresh and edible fruit and vegetables that can’t be sold for various reasons — and nowhere to store it.
“For us to throw it in the dumpster is a crying shame,” says Stanley Corriea Jr. of Stanley Produce Co., who has 150 pounds of sprouting garlic, each box worth $95 at its prime, to donate.
In August, the market hired Lasar to ensure that more of the food goes to the hungry rather than compost bins. Working with about half of the merchants, the program has recovered more than 224,000 pounds of produce, enough to supply roughly 186,000 meals.
Walking around the market with more visitors from Catholic Charities, Lasar points to a donation of 50 cases of broccoli packed in ice with freshly cut stems but slightly yellow tips.
“But that looks better than Safeway,” says Tim Evans of Catholic Charities.
There are several reasons the food gets left over. A supplier might send a produce company the wrong order — on the day I visited, those 100 cases of organic salad greens were supposed to be arugula — and the produce company can’t find anyone to buy it. Or the produce might be like the broccoli, perfectly edible but just past its prime, making it unusable for a grocer that needs it to last several days. Or there might just be a glut.
Yet getting all this food to the needy is complicated. There’s a window of just a few hours between when merchants decide to give it up and charities have to come get it. Lasar doesn’t know what’s available until she gets to work each morning, and then she quickly texts clients, including Mother Brown’s Kitchen in the Bayview, Glide Memorial United Methodist Church, Food Runners and Little Sisters of the Poor. They have to pick it up by 10, whether in a van, if they have one, or someone’s station wagon.
Homeless shelters and soup kitchens have their own limits on cold storage and staff, and menus are often planned months in advance. Getting donations of spinach or cress to add to a salad is easier than vegetables that need a lot of prep.
“Nobody wants artichokes,” Lasar says.
For years, the wholesale market donated extra produce to the SF-Marin Food Bank, which now more often works directly with large farms. In 2013, the market signed a new 60-year lease with the city, and its organization changed to nonprofit status. That’s when it expanded its community programs, including one that gets more fresh produce into corner stores in the Bayview.
Ironically, the wholesale market was where the city piloted its compost collection program back in 1996, which diverted organic matter from landfill. Now the goal is to divert food from the compost bin.
The wholesale market is applying for a grant so it can expand the program and possibly invest in its own cold storage to hold donated food longer for charities. Eventually, it might get its own delivery vehicles.
Recovering more food reduces the merchants’ compost fees. But that’s not the main reason they do it. As the cost of living surges, so do hunger rates in San Francisco, which increased by 4 percent between 2007 to 2014 according to SF-Marin Food Bank.
“The saddest thing is when you have to lock up the garbage,” says Corriea, whose grandfather and father found-
ed his company in 1941 when the wholesale produce market was located on the Embarcadero.
Lasar has worked in food recovery and agriculture for years, and she knows all the work and resources that go into growing each onion and orange. She’d love to get more of them to people in need.
“With each of the cracks in the system, the resources slip away,” she says. “On the other side, you have so many hungry people — so many people without an adequate healthy diet.
“The food is here.”